Writer. Born Dorothy Rothschild, on August 22, 1893, to J.H. Henry Rothschild and Eliza A. Marston Rothschild in West End, New Jersey.

Parker is best known for her poems and short stories, her often ascerbic wit, and for her participation in the ad hoc intellectual club, the Algonquin Round Table.

ParkerÕs mother died when she was four. She left school at age fourteen to care for her father, a New York clothing manufacturer. Her brother Henry died on the Titanic in 1912; her father died in 1913. Parker moved to a New York City boarding house in 1911 and worked playing piano at a dancing school. In 1915, her poem ÒAny PorchÓ was published by Vanity Fair. She was hired by Vogue to write captions, and after two years was transferred to Vanity Fair where she became a theater critic. Parker was fired by Vanity Fair in 1920 when her reviews became too negative. In 1922 she wrote her first short story, ÒSuch a Pretty Little Picture.Ó

In the spring of 1919, Parker started meeting for lunch with a group of intellectuals, writers and wits at the Algonquin Hotel, a gathering which became known as the Algonquin Round Table. Parker was the only female founding member of this group, which included, at various times, Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, James Thurber, George Kaufman, Noel Coward, Harpo Marx, and Ring Lardner. The group continued meeting throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.

Parker co-wrote the Broadway play Close Harmony (1924) with Elmer Rice. She contributed theater reviews and poetry for the first few issues of The New Yorker in 1925 and wrote for the humor magazine Life. She was hired as a book reviewer for The New Yorker in 1927, under the byline ÒThe Constant Reader.Ó

Parker published her first book of poetry Enough Rope, in 1927, followed by Death and Taxes in 1931. Her short-story collections included Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933), which contained her single most famous short story, Big Blonde. In 1929, Parker began screenwriting for MGM. She and her second husband, Alan Campbell, became screenwriting partners, moving to Hollywood and signing a contract with Paramount Pictures in 1935. Parker won an Academy Award for co-writing A Star is Born (1937).

In the early 1950s, Parker was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to discuss her possible involvement in the Communist Party. She refused to cooperate. Although she was not given a prison sentence, she was blacklisted, and her screenwriting career came to an abrupt halt. The FBI kept Parker under surveillance for fifteen years, amassing a 900-page dossier.

With screenwriting at an end, she turned to other artistic endeavors. In collaboration with Arnaud dÕUsseau, Parker wrote the Broadway play Ladies of the Corridor (1953). Between 1957 and 1963, she worked as a book reviewer for Esquire, contributing her last article for the magazine in 1964. Parker died of a heart attack at her home at New YorkÕs Hotel Volney on June 7, 1967. She left her entire literary estate to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and after his assassination, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Parker was married three times, twice to the same husband. She married stockbroker Edwin Pond Parker II in 1917; they divorced in 1928. She married screenwriter Alan Campbell in 1935, divorcing him in 1949 and remarrying him in 1962.